nexus88 gaming Scrubbing Up for a Peek at the Resuscitated Notre-Dame Cathedral

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When Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for The New York Times, stepped inside the storied Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris last summer he was amazed. Awe-inspired, even. He was also in a head-to-toe white scrub suit, with rubber boots and a hard hat.

The get-up was a precaution to avoid exposure to toxic lead dust, a caution imposed by the team leading the renovation. Scaffolding encased the building’s exterior. Inside, hundreds of construction workers in hazmat suits hammered, pushed carts and drove beeping trucks around and above him as they touched up frescoes in chapels and worked to restore the cathedral’s wood and lead roofing, its stained-glass windows and the famous spire that had snapped and plunged through the ceiling during the devastating 2019 fire that brought the world to its knees.

Watching them work, Mr. Kimmelman said, felt “like witnessing a kind of miracle.”

Mr. Kimmelman got early access to the cathedral, years into the restoration process, where he watched as workers carefully brought the building back to life. (After the fire, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised the cathedral would reopen in five years.) Mr. Kimmelman teamed up with Mika Gröndahl, an editor for The Times’s Graphics department, to present an immersive look at the rebuilding process ahead of the cathedral’s reopening on Saturday.

In an interview, Mr. Kimmelman reflected on his first impressions of the refurbishment, why it was so important to painstakingly restore the cathedral and whether a building made of new materials can still be considered the same building. These are edited excerpts.

How did you get access to Notre-Dame before it reopened?

They had been, for years, very reluctant to let anyone in who wasn’t working on the cathedral. It took me about five years to finally get a peek. I teamed up with a colleague, Aurelien Breeden, a reporter in the Paris bureau, to try to organize a visit in June and to keep track of what was going on at Notre-Dame.

He appealed to the authorities at Notre-Dame over and over; we tried to put a full-court press on to suggest that it was really urgent that we start in the summer if we were going to produce something meaningful for the opening. They agreed, and were very generous. We spent a day looking throughout the cathedral and meeting with various people who were in charge of the restoration, and some of the workers.

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